Cell-like chemically active droplets may contain clues about origins of life. Chemically active droplets that grow and divide like cells may have been key to the origins of life, according to a study published in the December 2016 issue of Nature Physics. Chemically active droplets can exhibit cycles of growth and division that resemble the proliferation of living cells. "It makes it more plausible that there could have been spontaneous emergence of life from nonliving soup," said study co-author Frank Julicher.

Discovery of five new species of tetrapod that lived between 360 million and 345 million years ago may help bridge the gap of 15 million years in the tetrapod fossil record and reveal more about how creatures moved from aquatic life to living on land. The new species plus seven other fragmentary fossils are described in a study published in the December 5th 2016 issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Evidence that Evolution Trends Towards Increasing Body Size - A new study of the evolution of marine animals has found evidence that Cope's Rule, which hypothesizes that animal lineages evolve toward larger body size over time, is true. The researchers analyzed data that spaned over 500 million years and included more than 17,000 marine animal species. They found that body volumes had increased by over five orders of magnitude since the first animals evolved. Modeling also suggested that such a massive increase could not have emerged from neutral drift from a small initial value. Science 2015, 347, 867-870.

Fossilized 530 Myr Embryos Found in China - Fossilized embryos of a previously unknown creature have been found in southern China, dating back between 521 million and 541 million years, during the Cambrian period. It remains a mystery what these embryos would have grown up to become but some of the spheres had polygonal patterns that look similar to those seen on fossilized embryos from a Cambrian worm-like creature. "We found over 140 spherically shaped fossils, some of which include features that are reminiscent of division-stage embryos, essentially frozen in time," said University of Missouri researcher James Schiffbauer. See the full paper in the March 2014 issue of the Journal of Paleontology.

Multicellular
Life Present > 586 Million Years Ago
- No fossils or trace
fossils of multicellular bilaterian
life have been reported from early
in the Ediacaran era, though
molecular clocks and biomarker
studies indicate the possibility.
Pecoits and colleagues report in the
6/29/2012 issue of Science on
the discovery of the oldest
bilaterian burrows in shallow-water
glaciomarine sediments from the
Tacuarķ Formation, Uruguay. These
findings unite the paleontological
and molecular data pertaining to the
evolution of bilaterians.
Read more .....

Synthetic Genetic Evolution of
polymers, broadly referred to as
XNAs, can replicate and evolve just
like their naturally occurring
counterparts DNA and RNA.
According to a study in the April
19th 2012 issue of the journal
Science, the results of the
research have implications not only
for the fields of biotechnology and
drug design, but also for research
into the origins of life---on this
planet and beyond. This means
that you don't need to have the
ribose and deoxyribose backbones of
RNA and DNA in order to have
transmittable, heritable, and
evolvable information.
Read more....

Microscopic, sponge-like African
fossils could be the earliest
known animals--and possibly our
earliest evolutionary ancestors. The
creature, Otavia antiqua, was found
in 760-million-year-old rock in
Namibia and was as tiny as it may be
important. From these tiny "sponges"
sprang very big things, the authors
suggest in an
article appearing in the South
African Journal of Science .
As possibly the first muticellular
animals, Otavia could well be the
forerunner of dinosaurs,
humans-basically everything we think
of as "animal."
Read more......

The "Cambrian Extinction" may not
have happenedaccording
to the report in the May 13th 2010
issue of the journal Nature.
A new fossil find in Morocco shows
that the disappearance of Burgess
Shale fossils is not due to an
extinction event, but more likely
reflects the absence of preservation
of similar soft-bodied organisms in
later periods. The discovery of
diverse soft-bodied creatures
provides a link between earlier
communities and the latter
"explosion of life".

Why
Ray Comfort is wrong - On
November 11th, 2009, Ray Comfort, an
evolution denier,
distributed copies of Darwin's first
book on college campuses, with an
introduction written by him making a
long list of bizarre claims about
Darwin and evolution. Help fight
this mis-information by printing out
this one sheet rebuttal and
distributing it where needed.

A Does evolution go in reverse?
Since the late 19th
century, biologists have debated if
evolution can go in reverse. If not,
then evolution may depend on more
than natural selection.
Multiple evolutionary paths could be
possible through small chance
events. Previous studies have
focused on complex traits such as
whale flippers, and scientists often
lack sufficient information about
ancestral traits or how present-day
traits evolved. Scientists now have
evidence that evolution doesn't make
U-turns, simply reversing selective
pressure won't make a biomolecule
revert to an earlier form.... see
ScienceNOW Daily News 23 Sep
2009

A 47-million-year-old primate fossil
that is a missing link, promises to
shed new light
on
the earliest stages of evolution of
the lineage that eventually led to
humans. The unprecedented fossil of
a lemur-like creature that probably
weighed no more than 2 pounds when
it was fully grown is remarkable
because it is the most complete
primate specimen ever obtained. The
article describing the find can be
seen at
in the 19 May 2009 issue of
PLoS

15 Evolutionary Gems -
provided by the journal Nature, this
is a new resource summarizing
fifteen lines of evidence for
evolution by natural selection.
As the editors explain, "About a
year ago, an Editorial in [Nature]
urged scientists and their
institutions to 'spread the word'
and highlight reasons why scientists
can treat evolution by natural
selection as ....an established
fact". Check it out at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/newspdf/evolutiongems.pdf

EXPELLED EXPOSED ! A
detailed look at the Ben Stein movie
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
We'll show you why this movie is not
a documentary at all, but
anti-science propaganda aimed at
creating the appearance of
controversy where there is none.
Check it out at:
http://www.expelledexposed.com/

Fossil Crocodile is "Missing Link" -
It has a mix of morphological traits
common in prehistoric crocodiles and
in the ones that exist today.
The fossil of a land-bound reptile
that could be a link between
prehistoric and modern-day
crocodiles. The
80-million-year-old predator, dubbed
Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi, is
5.5-foot-long (1.6-meter-long) and
was a long-limbed and extremely
agile animal that roamed arid
terrain in what is now the Brazilian
countryside, As a missing link to
prehistoric crocodiles, it offers us
an excellent opportunity to study
the evolutionary transition of these
animals. For more see
National Geographic News (Feb.
2008).

Evolution's Greatest Mistakes -
As miraculous as living things might
seem at first glance, a closer look
reveals that evolution's blind
blunderings often fall well short of
perfection. Claire Ainsworth and
Michael Le Page peek under the hood
of life to assess the parts and
processes where things seem to have
gone spectacularly wrong.
New Scientist 195.2616 (August 11,
2007): p36 (4).

Study Maps Evolution's Tiny Steps -
For the first time, scientists have
drawn a detailed map of the
evolutionary steps taken by a
protein that links modern humans to
life that swam in the oceans 450
million years ago. The study,
published in the journal
Science, provides further rebuttal
to creationists by filling in the
gaps that show how evolution
occurred on a molecular level. Read
more at The
News & Observer or in the
8/17/2007 issue of the Journal
Science vol.317, no.5840,
pp.884-85

Twin fossil find adds twist to human
evolution - unearthed in
Kenya, they show that two ancestral
human species seem to have lived
cheek-by-jowl in the same area, much
as gorillas and chimpanzees do
today. Both skull fragments,
discovered by Fred Spoor of
University College London and his
colleagues, were found near Kenya's
Lake Turkana, adding to the
impressive list of early human
fossils unearthed here. One of the
fossils, an upper jawbone from the
species Homo habilis, is dated at
1.44 million years, younger than
most fossils of this species. Read
more in the
8/8/2007 issue of the journal
Nature.

A
new website from the Federation of
American Societies for Experimental
Biology offers resources for to help
defend Darwinism. Downloadable
documents provide pointers on
meeting with public officials,
testifying at school board hearings,
and related topics. Much of the
advice is common sense, but some of
it may be counterintuitive for
scientists. (!/16/07)

The Bacterial Flagella Evolved not
Designed. In an article
published on-line 9/6/2006 in
Nature Reviews
Microbiology (or see
short summary),
Mark Pallen of the University of
Birmingham and Nicholas Matzke of
NCSE, review the evidence for
the evolution of the bacterial
flagellum. They handily
dismiss the need for any great
conceptual leaps in creating a model
of flagellar evolution and speculate
as to how an experimental program
focused on this topic might look.

Growing evidence that evolution is
not just real but is actually
still happening to humans today.
"From 1970 to 2000, the view was
that although natural selection is
very important, it is relatively
rare, That view was driven
largely because we did not have data
to identify the signals of natural
selection. In the last five years,
there has been a tremendous growth
in understanding how much selection
there is. Everywhere we look, there
appears to be very widespread
signals of natural selection in many
genes and many processes."
wrote Dr. Jonathan Pritchard, a
geneticist at the University of
Chicago, in a recent
article in PLoS-Biology.
Our insight to evolution and natural
selection has deepened as we
have gained the ability to read the
human genome.

Irreducible Complexity Refuted - By reconstructing ancient
genes from long-extinct animals,
scientists have for the first time
demonstrated the step-by-step
progression of how evolution created
a new piece of molecular machinery
by reusing and modifying existing
parts. The findings offer a
counterargument to doubters of
evolution who question how a
progression of small changes could
produce the intricate mechanisms
found in living cells. This
experiment refutes the notion of
"irreducible complexity".

A 375-million-year-old fish fossil with the beginnings of
legs - A large scaly creature not seen before, it
appears to be a long-sought missing link in the evolution of
some fishes from water to walking on land. The skeletons
have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish.
It shows anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a
fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate
the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of
amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually
humans. See also
Shubin et al., Nature 440 (2006) 764-71

A Catholic Scientist and Priest Looks at Evolution
- Father George V. Coyne, Vatican Observatory Director
and Jesuit, shares his convictions that (1) the
Intelligent Design (ID) movement, while evoking a God of
power and might, a designer God, actually belittles God,
makes her/him too small and paltry; (2) our scientific
understanding of the universe, untainted by religious
considerations, provides for those who believe in God a
marvelous opportunity to reflect upon their beliefs.

Statement
from American Association for the Advancement of Scienceopposes
"intelligent design theory' as part of any public school
science curricula. A religious concept, ID contains significant
conceptual flaws, lacks credible scientific evidence, and
misrepresents scientific facts.
More....

The New Creationism and Its Threat to Science Literacy
and Education. (An
Editorial from the President of the Americam Biological
Association)
Just how widespread is science literacy in the
United States? That this country is the acknowledged
leader of scientific research in terms of quantity and
overall quality suggests our scientific enterprise is
robust. Nevertheless, there is evidence that most US
citizens have a poor understanding of science...More...

Teaching
the Science of Evolution In the Summer 2004 issue
of Cell Biology Education, Bruce Alberts, president
of the National Academies, and Jay Labov of the Center
for Education at the National Research Council
write, "Cell and molecular biologists have provided some
of the most compelling evidence to support
evolution and should therefore be among those who raise
their voices " More.....

“Those
who cavalierly reject... Evolution, as not adequately
supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory
is supported by no facts at all.” —Herbert Spencer